Nora Webster (8 page)

“No, but it will fade, and I guarantee that you’ll be back here in a month for the same again. I’ve never known anyone to go back to the grey. But maybe the next time we’ll think of putting some highlights in. They’re all the rage now as well.”

“Highlights? Oh, I don’t think so.”

Outside, she lifted her head high and hoped that all the women in Court Street and John Street would be busy cooking and that none of them would be standing at the door. She prayed that she would meet no one she knew. In her mind she went through the worst possible encounters, the people who would most deplore the idea that, with her husband six months in the grave, she had dyed her hair a colour it had never been before. She thought of Jim, and knew that she would have to face him and Margaret within a week. They would not know what to think.

As she saw Mrs. Hogan from John Street walking towards her, Nora could not tell whether Mrs. Hogan simply did not recognise her, or if she wanted to get by her without making any comment. Just as Mrs. Hogan approached her, she seemed almost to jump. Her face quivered and then she stopped.

“Well, that will take some getting used to,” she said.

Nora tried to smile.

“Was it Bernie?” Mrs. Hogan asked.

Nora nodded.

“I heard she got some new packets in all right. God, I must go to her myself.”

If Mrs. Hogan, in her apron and a pair of very worn-looking shoes, felt that she had the right to comment on Nora’s hair, then there was, Nora felt, no reason why she could not comment in reply.

“Well, you know where she is,” she said drily, looking at Mrs.
Hogan’s hair, clearly suggesting that it could benefit from some treatment. It took Mrs. Hogan a moment to take in the possibility that she was being insulted.

The encounter made Nora feel brave. She would stop for nobody else, but she knew that what had happened was a mistake. She wondered if she had ever done anything like this before in her life, acted on a whim without any thought for the consequences. Before she was married, she remembered, as she came back from work one day at dinner-time, she found a stall of old books outside Warren’s Auctioneers at the bottom of Castle Hill. As she perused the books she found a volume of poems by Browning, one of whose poems she had loved in school. She was flicking through the pages when she was joined by old Mrs. Carty from Bohreen Hill. They both checked the price of the book which was written in pencil on the inside page. It was far too high, and, in any case, she had no money. They both walked away and moved together along Friary Place and up Friary Hill. As they parted at the top of the hill, Mrs. Carty handed her the book from under her coat.

“No one will miss that,” she said. “But don’t tell anyone where you got it.”

Walking home with her new hair dye reminded her of walking into her mother’s house with that volume of Browning’s poems. It was the same feeling of guilt, the same feeling that someone would follow her and find her out.

Quickly, when she arrived home, she boiled some potatoes and opened a tin of peas and put three lamb chops on the pan. When the boys arrived the potatoes were not ready. She waited upstairs, calling down to let them know that their dinner would be a bit late. She sat in front of the mirror at the dressing table and tried to work out if there was anything she could do to her hair to make it look
more normal. She wished she had told Bernie not to use the lacquer, which was sticky and had a sweet smell.

As soon as the boys saw her they both became quiet. Donal looked away while Conor moved towards her. He reached up and touched her hair.

“It’s all hard,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“I had my hair done this morning,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“What’s under there?”

“Under what?”

“Under what you have on your head.”

“What I have on my head is my hair.”

“Are you going to go out?” he asked.

Donal glanced at her again and looked away.

Nora was not sure what she should wear to the Gibneys’. If she dressed up too much then it might look as though she did not need a job and that she was coming to their house as an equal, merely on a social visit. But she could not wear old clothes either. The problem of what to wear would never go away, she realised. If she went back to the office there, she would be seen by everyone as a friend of William and Peggy Gibney. There were still people there whom she had known all those years before but had not kept in touch with. She was sure that they would resent her or feel strange about her, were she to appear back working with them.

Once she decided that she would drive across the town and park the car in the Railway Square so that no one could comment on her hair, however, she no longer felt afraid. She looked at her clothes hanging in the wardrobe and selected a grey suit and a dark blue
blouse. She would wear her best shoes. She did not know what the Gibneys intended to say to her, or whether they would offer her work. They could, she thought, hardly discuss rates of pay with her over afternoon tea. Whatever they had in mind, she believed now that it was important not to arrive at their large house like someone in need.

The door was answered by Mrs. Whelan, who led Nora into a big sitting-room on the right-hand side of the hall. It was filled with darkly upholstered furniture and old pictures. Even though it was still the afternoon, the room was filled with shadows; the long window did not let in much light.

Peggy Gibney rose from her chair. As the cardigan she was wearing around her shoulders slipped, Mrs. Whelan moved hastily to put it back in place. Peggy Gibney did not acknowledge this, but behaved as though it was a normal part of the service offered to her as a woman in a grand room. She motioned to Nora to take an armchair opposite her own and then turned to Mrs. Whelan.

“Maggie, will you phone across to the office and tell Mr. Gibney that Mrs. Webster has arrived?”

Nora remembered that, years before, when Peggy found herself pregnant, she was not married to William, and William’s parents had not approved of her. One day, while Nora sat quietly in the outer office, she heard old Mr. Gibney telling William that Peggy could go to England and have the baby and find a home for it there. She had supposed as William walked out of the office that he was going to find Peggy to tell her. But instead he had married Peggy and Peggy had had the baby in a nursing home in the town, and slowly William’s parents had got used to her and grown close to the child. Now Peggy Gibney sat in this house, talking to Nora as though there had never been any doubt about her station in the world.

Peggy’s voice had none of the old careless intonations of the town. Instead, she spoke in a way that was considered, almost preoccupied.

“Oh, well,” she said, as though Nora or someone else had raised the subject, “with all the taxes now, and the cost of living, I don’t know how a lot of people manage.”

When Nora asked her about her brother and her sisters, she realised that she had made a mistake.

“They are fine, Nora, fine,” she said in an accent that became slightly grand. “We all live our own lives.”

Nora took this to mean that they were not invited into Peggy’s sitting-room. When she asked about Peggy’s children, however, she brightened up immediately.

“You know, William wanted each one of them to have a qualification before they came home to work in the firm so that they’d have an expertise.”

She pronounced the word “expertise” with deliberation.

“So, William Junior is a fully fledged accountant and Thomas is an efficiency expert and Elizabeth did a commercial course in one of the best colleges in Dublin. So they can all stand on their own feet.”

“Is that right, Peggy?” Nora asked.

She thought of old Mrs. Lewis in the Mill Park Road, whose only topic of conversation was her children and their careers, and how she would end each time by saying that she planned to make Christina, her youngest, into a typewriter. Nora found it difficult in the sombre air of Peggy’s sitting-room not to laugh. She had to concentrate fiercely to keep a straight face.

“There are a lot of changes in the town, they tell me,” Peggy said. “I don’t get out much myself, and, you know, we go to Rosslare
when we can. It’s very peaceful down there, but no matter where I am I always find that I have too much to do.”

Nora tried to think who had told her that Peggy had a full-time maid working in the house, as well as Mrs. Whelan.

“But I can’t get William to take a proper holiday. Oh, he’d worry too much about this and that. He drives up and down to Rosslare all right but I don’t call that a holiday.”

When William came into the room he seemed smaller than Nora remembered. He was wearing a three-piece suit. As he shook Nora’s hand, she wondered if he still lived with the memory of how his father had treated him from the time he took him out of school aged sixteen, how badly he had paid him over the years and how he had referred to him in front of anyone who would listen as “the fool.” But William’s father was long dead now, and the firm had passed to him, so perhaps, she thought, all of that had been erased from everyone’s memory except her own.

“It was very good of you to visit,” he said, sitting down, as Mrs. Whelan came in with tea and biscuits.

“Thoughtful, thoughtful,” he added, as though his mind was now on some other, graver subject.

Nora looked at him evenly and did not reply. She was not going to thank him for anything.

“My father always said you were the best and you never made a mistake, you and Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn’t be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all.”

“Oh, he talked very warmly about you,” Peggy interjected, “and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay
in bed and he wouldn’t, oh no he wouldn’t, because he had a double commerce class with Mr. Webster that he could not miss. You know they wanted Thomas to stay in Dublin when he qualified. Oh, he got offers with very good prospects! We told him he should consider them. But he preferred to come home. That’s the way it was. It was the same with William. With Elizabeth, you’d never know. She might go anywhere. She’s the one to watch.”

There was something in Peggy Gibney’s loquaciousness, in the way she felt free to talk about herself and her family, that Nora found almost deliberately created to undermine her, a way of establishing that Peggy had become someone who had a high opinion of herself and she expected others to feel the same. William, Nora supposed, must employ a hundred people, perhaps more. She understood that it might have been difficult for Peggy Gibney to remain ordinary, but she saw no reason why she should sit opposite her and offer her anything except silence.

With William it was different. He seemed to mumble and had a nervous way of repeating words and then stopping as if in search of another word.

“We’d always have an opening, Nora,” he began, “an opening . . .”

Nora looked at him and smiled.

“Some of the girls in the office can barely spell,” Peggy interjected again, “and can hardly count and yet when it comes to giving cheek and taking sick days—”

“Well now,” William said. “Well now.”

Nora watched William closely, looking for any indication that he found Peggy as irritating as she did, but he appeared too distanced and fidgety to notice his wife at all.

“And the cut of some of them! Elizabeth says—”

“Thomas,” William interrupted, “thinks the world of Miss
Kavanagh, and she is the office manager, and perhaps if I can get you and Thomas briefly to go over the details, the details, he knows more than I do.”

He stopped for a moment and looked at Nora, as though unsure what he might say now.

“God knows,” he went on, his eyes on the carpet, “I’m just the manager of the company, the head of the company. But he could introduce you to Miss Kavanagh, and then you could, if you know what I mean, start whenever you wanted. You could start whenever you wanted.”

“Is that Francie Kavanagh?” Nora asked.

“I suppose it is,” William said, “although it might be a while since anyone called her that.”

“Oh, of course,” Peggy said. “You would have known her in the old days. Thomas gives a glowing account of her. And have you two kept in touch?”

“Pardon?” Nora asked sharply.

“I mean have you and Miss Kavanagh stayed friends?”

The question implied that Peggy had not had time herself over the years to bother knowing such things, or to bother staying friends with anyone. Nonetheless, Nora wondered how much she knew, if she was aware, for example, of a Thursday twenty-five years or more earlier—surely it had been talked about—a half-day in Gibney’s, when Nora and Greta Wickham had decided to cycle to Ballyconnigar and how Francie Kavanagh had asked to come with them, and how they had ridden their bicycles fast to get ahead of her and then had gone to Morriscastle instead of Ballyconnigar. And how they had almost laughed openly rather than apologised when they learned that Francie had got a puncture near The Ballagh on the way home and had got drenched in the rain that came after nightfall and
then, having sheltered under a tree, did not get back until the early hours of the morning. She had never spoken to them again.